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Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Drafts from the past

Today I stumbled upon this annual opportunity with Text Publishing, The Tenth Annual Text Prize, which is taking submissions targeted at children and young adults until 3 February. I am not hopeful, but I thought it would provide some motivation for me to dust off an old manuscript and edit with a goal in mind.

So I opened my NaNoWriMo project from 2013 for the first time since I last edited it in September 2014. And, yikes. Cringe. I've got a lot of work to do. I would like to think that my writing has come a long way since I first typed out WALLS, but I guess there's a chance I am still as terrible at writing now as I feel I was looking back at that manuscript.

I am also still job-hunting like a headless chook and working on an academic paper that's due at the end of January, so in all honesty, it's very unlikely I will have edited all 85K+ words of WALLS to the point where I'd be happy to submit it anywhere by the early February deadline. At least I have made a start, and maybe this will get the ball rolling for me again properly.

7 comments:

I recall reading the first chapter of WALLS way back when; I think it's well worth dusting off and putting time in on, though it is always a question of time, isn't it? Best of luck with the job and the paper, and what's a a chook? I'm guessing it's some kind of chicken, since over here we say, "running around like a chicken with its head cut off."